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Open Source Red Hat Software

Red Hat Changes Its Open-Source Licensing Rules (zdnet.com) 160

Posted by EditorDavid from the taking-licenses dept.
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: When leading Linux company Red Hat announces that -- from here on out -- all new Red Hat-initiated open-source projects that use the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) or GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v2.1 licenses will be expected to supplement the license with GPL version 3 (GPLv3)'s cure commitment language, it's a big deal. Both older open-source licenses are widely used.

When the GPLv3 was released, it came with an express termination approach that offered developers the chance to cure license compliance errors. This termination policy in GPLv3 provided a way for companies to repair licensing errors and mistakes... Other companies -- CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE -- have taken similar GPL positions... In its new position statement, Red Hat explained that the GPLv2 and LGPL, as written, has led to the belief that automatic license termination and copyright infringement claims can result from a single act of inadvertent non-compliance.
"We hope that others will also join in this endeavor," says Red Hat's senior commercial counsel, Richard Fontana, "to reassure the open source community that good faith efforts to fix noncompliance will be embraced."

ZDNet points out that the move to new licenses "doesn't apply, of course, to Linux itself. Linus Torvalds has made it abundantly clear that Linux has been, will now, and always shall be under the GPLv2."
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Red Hat Changes Its Open-Source Licensing Rules More

Red Hat Changes Its Open-Source Licensing Rules

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  • Many Red Hat products are Apache licence (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Look at the middleware offerings..... Not GPL.

  • My overly optimistic reaction, without having studied the details, is that other distributions will fear legal messes and will drop systemd.

    Please don't anybody burst my bubble. Sigh.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      Childish.

      • No, systemd is childish and badly engineered, without regard for the proper Unix way of doing things.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bobby ( 109046 )

          Thank you. A quick review of "megol's" posts reveals mostly personal attacks and insults. Hopefully someone will downmod.

          Back to the topic: I don't care if some want to use systemd; my complaint is that systemd is default in too many major distributions and difficult to remove.

  • I thought the GPL would not allow additional conditions and this reads like, well, an additional condition. I need Bruce to explain this to me. Where are you, Bruce?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The original author(s) can add any condition they want, as long as it gives you extra freedoms (the reverse is possible legally, but then it is not GPL anymore). If this was not the case it would not be possible to combine a BSD work with a GPL work. After all, one could end up in the BSD license starting from GPL and simply adding exceptions that give the user more freedom until it is essentially BSD.

      Redhat is stating that it will add this exception to all their GPL work going forward. In practice little w

    • Re:Can they do that? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @01:07PM (#56833886)

      If you're the copyright holder you can license the code any way you like. You can take a standard license text and add clauses to it. Typically people say they are licensing the code under the GPL with some exception. For example, GCC is licensed under the GPLv2 or later, with the exception added that the code generated by the compiler (your compiled executable) is not licensed under the GPL.

      Of course you cannot take someone else's code that is under the GPL and add your own exceptions to the license without negotiating with the copyright holders.

      As to the RedHat's statement about people believing the GPLv2 as written implies immediate termination of the license in the event of a license violation, I belief that's just how the US copyright law functions. By default *no one* has any right to use code that is copyrighted by someone else, except as granted explicitly by license. When that license is breached, the default position under US copyright law is that you have no rights to the code.

      I support RedHat's proposal and I think it will generate some good will and ease some of the FUD that's out there.

    • For new Red Hat code they produce, they can of course license it any way they like.

      For pre-existing GPLv2 code, a LOT of that code is licensed "GPL, v2 or any later version". Redhat can modify that and distribute it under the "or" option - any later version.

      Personally, I no longer trust Stallman enough to license my code "any later version". There's no telling what he'll put in GPLv4. Had he taken suggestions and either not pit the patent stuff in v3, or clarified that wording, I'd be comfortable with "any

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        You're of course welcome to remove any clause from the GPL you wish. Linus Torvalds did just that when he licensed the kernel; the "or any later version" clause is removed. Hence the Linux kernel is stuck at GPLv2 forever, since it's not possible to even contact all of the copyright holders for any re-licensing. So the anti-Tivoization clauses in the GPLv3 can never be used by the kernel, for better or worse.

        That said, if it's your code you can license it to others anyway you want at any time, regardless

        • > You're of course welcome to remove any clause from the GPL you wish. Linus Torvalds did just that when he licensed the kernel; the "or any later version" clause is removed.

          https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o... [gnu.org]

          You may NOT modify the license and still call it GPL, nor use the GPL preamble.

          If you grep the license, the GPL.org copy,
          ( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/o... [gnu.org] )
          you'll see there IS no "or any later version" grant in the license. Nothing was removed. Rather, you'll find that suggestion as an option after

          • Here's a little additional information on how Stillman intends the "or any later version" mechanism to be used. It provides a method to slowly obsolete an old version of the license in case a major problem comes up.

            Suppose version 1.0 of some software was distributed under "version 1 or later" of the GPL. Many people contribute. Some people leave the project and new people join. The new people can keep distributing the old contributions, if they follow GPLv1 OR any later version. Suppose there is a court

  • RE: Linux, Linus' opinion is irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by allquixotic ( 1659805 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @02:10PM (#56834158)

    Regarding Linux, Linus Torvalds' own opinion is completely irrelevant, unless you wanted to use an extremely antiquated, practically useless version of Linux from the 90s.

    The actual Linux kernel code is an incredible mish-mash of thousands of contributors' code, both companies and individuals. Each passing day brings more and more copyright owners into the Linux kernel, because each person retains copyright over their individual contributions, and each day brings at least one new kernel contributor.

    In order to change the copyright license of the current Linux source code, ALL of the contributors of the current version of Linux -- or their estate in case of deceased people, or the liquidator company in case of bankrupt companies -- would need to agree to the license change. Even assuming that every last contributor could be convinced to agree to change the license, there would still be logistical problems in actually contacting all of them. Deceased contributors probably have invalid email addresses on file, and likewise for contributors who sent in patches from a corporate email address and have since moved on. Just the task of contacting the legal copyright holder of every line of Linux source becomes a nearly futile task, even if you go back to a hideously old and putrid version like kernel 2.0 or 2.2.

    You might think that you could discombobulate some of the "long tail" of contributors by just removing any source lines (using a Git script) that were contributed by someone not in the top 100 contributors. If you did that, you might wonder, wouldn't that leave an almost-working kernel that the top 100 contributors could then carry forward with, fixing the little one-liners that drive-by patchers gave them here and there? And then you could surely hunt down a mere 100 contributors (or their estates) and change the license -- right? Well, no.

    Per this -- http://www.remword.com/kps_res... [remword.com] : there are 19,817 kernel contributors just since 2005 (and quite a few more before then, as Linux was indeed quite popular and noteworthy among engineers in, say, 2004; people even made a halfway decent desktop OS based on it by this time). Half the people -- 9912 to be exact -- contributed 2 or fewer patch sets, which only amounts to 1% of the total patch sets. If we assume that, on average, over a large dataset, any two patchsets are equally likely to be any given size regardless of contributor (which may or may not be a safe assumption), that still means that 1 out of every 100 lines of code in the Linux kernel would have to be independently re-written by someone else if we removed the long tail of copyright owners.

    And that would only reduce your total number of contributors by _half_; you'd still have 9000-some contributors who have 3 or more patchsets to their name. I wish that site would tell us what percentage of the codebase is contributed by, say, the last 15,000 people in the list of contributors sorted by number of patchsets. It would probably be something ridiculous like 20 or 30%, meaning that if you wanted to whittle down the number of copyright holders in the kernel to about 4000, you would have to re-write (independently, without peeking) about 1 in 5 lines of code on average. Eww.

    Not to mention that randomly removing lines of code (or small but important fixes) all over the codebase would create a mess that probably wouldn't compile, and once it did compile, it'd need to be heavily tested, debugged and fixed just to get it nominally working on modern hardware.

    So, yes, peoples' opinions about what the license of the Linux kernel "should be" are completely and totally irrelevant. We can't remove the code from a significant number of contributors to the kernel to whittle down the list, because doing so would spark a many-year project to get the kernel back to some semblance of what it is today. And we can't contact everyone and try to get everyone to agree to a license change, because you're probably going to be sim

    • "Regarding Linux, Linus Torvalds' own opinion is completely irrelevant"

      For the current code base, you are correct.

      However, for completely new contributions, his opinion does matter.

      Good luck trying to get a new feature or driver merged with a GPLv3 licence header in it ...

      • Actually, due to the way copyright works, his opinion still doesn't matter for new drivers. Any new driver or component added to the Linux kernel source would be considered (necessarily) a derivative work of the Linux kernel, because it would directly reference and depend upon both the specification and the implementation of probably hundreds of internal Linux functions -- for memory management, data structures, algorithms, informing the kernel about the behavior of the driver, logging, etc. I've read a few

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by amorsen ( 7485 )

          You can easily reason your way to "all drivers or components must be GPL", but sometimes you have to look at what you can actually get away with. The fact is that lots of phone manufacturers distribute Linux kernels + proprietary extensions, in binary form. No one sues them, and it is unclear whether such a lawsuit would be successful, despite the rather obvious and easy-to-understand language of the GPLv2.

          Similarly, you can reason that Linus Torvalds couldn't relicense Linux to anything other than GPLv2. I

    • He might well agree with RH: do ask him if he approves of the clause, and if he'd recommend to other Linux contributors. I'm sure he'll tell you if he disapproves (;-))

  • ZDNet points out that the move to new licenses "doesn't apply, of course, to Linux itself. Linus Torvalds has made it abundantly clear that Linux has been, will now, and always shall be under the GPLv2."

    While it's true that the Linux kernel is sticking with the GPLv2, Torvalds and many of the other copyright holders have already adopted the GPLv3's cure commitment language [kernel.org].

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